I think the main issue is that the difficulty gap between survival and hardcore is pretty vast. One is so easy a cave man could do it, and the other is rather unforgiving. Any argument based on the fact that we are "making survival easy" is invalid, because survival is already so easy that it is nearly impossible to make it easier. Thus, we should focus more on attracting/keeping members, and less on trying to keep the final shred of difficulty that survival maintains (which is the first night).